Thom Yorke - Tomorrow's Modern Boxes

Deluxe Edition 180 Gram White Vinyl

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Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is the second solo album by English alternative rock musician Thom Yorke, released in September 2014 via Landgrab Records.

Thomas "Thom" Yorke is an English musician best known as the singer and principal songwriter of the alternative rock band Radiohead. A multi-instrumentalist, Yorke mainly plays guitar and piano, but also plays instruments including keyboards, bass, and drums, and works extensively with synthesisers, sequencers and programming. He is also known for his falsetto vocals.

Yorke released Tomorrow's Modern Boxes independently via a paid-for BitTorrent bundle. He and producer Nigel Godrich expressed their wish to find "an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work". The album was downloaded over a million times within six days of release, and became the most-downloaded legal torrent of 2014. By February 2015, it had been downloaded over 4.5 million times.

Tomorrow's Modern Boxes warms up the icy exteriors of predecessor Eraser. Yorke never attempts to abandon his fixation on pre-EDM electronica - at this point, his affection for turn-of-the-millennium intelligent dance music could almost qualify as classicist - but there's a scuffed warmth to much of this album, with the warped waves of keyboards gently gliding into a rhythm later articulated by a loop. Such aural sleights of hand never call attention to themselves but neither does the album as a whole.

Tomorrow's Modern Boxes is deliberately underwhelming, an old-fashioned grower that doesn't startle upon first listen but rather slowly unfolds. Even then, the album is stubbornly subtle, with Yorke exploring the space between gaps, not the chasm itself. Less charitable listeners could call it mood music and they wouldn't be wrong, because Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich are so controlled, they offer variations of a theme instead of a wide palette.

This is not dissimilar to Eraser, but instead of wallowing in alienation, Yorke has found comfort within it on Tomorrow's Modern Boxes and the difference is palpable.